The Hollywood insider gave up his material possessions for enlightenment. In his new movie, he shows you how.

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A few years ago, director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, Patch Adams) fell off his bike. Hard. Hard enough to get a concussion, and hard enough to knock loose any capitalist, non-hippie notions he may have had about actually enjoying his money. After a months-long recovery, Shadyac set out with renewed vigor to complete a plan he'd started many years before: give away his possessions. (He documents his worldview in the new movie I Am, which begins a national rollout mid-February.) He didn't get rid of everything — he's not crazy, after all, just enlightened — but he did give up the private jets and lavish vacations, the cars, the paintings. He even sold his multimillion-dollar house and moved to a mobile home. (It's a nice mobile home, but still.) And he's finally happy.

ESQUIRE:Why the big change?

TOM SHADYAC: I began to wake up to principles. Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under. When I applied that rule to my own life and saw that I was operating outside of what I think is natural, I wanted to reconsider that.

TS: I am operating under the philosophy that I will simply use what I need and the rest — even if I still have it somewhere — is not mine. It is others'. It is for the healing of the natural world. And it is in the process of returning.

ESQ:That's very generous.

TS: I don't consider anything I'm doing as generous. In the new model of the world, I hope people will consider whatever I'm doing as just normal. The way I think we were living before is an invention. The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.

ESQ:Is it safe to say you're done with movies?

TS: No. Why would I be done with movies?

ESQ:Big-budget movies don't seem to fit into your new lifestyle.

TS: No. I have not walked away from Hollywood. I'm walking away from the way I personally did business in Hollywood. The budget of whatever movie I do needs to be efficient; it needs to consider what kind of resources we're using and how to be as responsible as possible. But no, I'm not — I love storytelling.

ESQ:Are you happier than before?

TS: Unquestionably happier.

ESQ:Is that just because you've revised your definition of happiness?

TS: The word contentment comes from the word content, which is what we hold inside — love, value, a feeling of a life that has meaning or purpose, a cause greater than yourself that you're a part of. These are the things that bring true happiness. As a culture, I think we need to redefine what it means to be happy.

ESQ:That's going to be a hard sell in this country.

TS: It's only a hard sell to people who are not quite, in my mind, awake. Everything I'm telling you, there's no bad news to it. There is an energy that is coming through, that is alive and purposeful and hard to dismiss. I didn't write these rules. Why do you think it's a tough sell?

ESQ:The principles you're espousing are the opposite of most people's idea of success.

TS: The question is, if I wasn't pushed [towards that sort of thing], how would I be? If I was raised in a different culture, how would I be? If you brought our conversation and the tension that we're feeling in our culture up to somebody, say, in Ladakh [India], they wouldn't know what you're talking about. It's just natural.

ESQ:But we've seen those things. It's a matter of innocence. If we didn't know those luxuries existed, we wouldn't miss them. But we do, so we're going to want them forever.

TS: The answer's not to go back to native cultures, and the answer's not to bring native cultures up to us. The answer is to blend the ideologies that made native cultures long-term cultures. Our way has been tried before and every time someone tries our way, they die off. You look at native cultures — they've lasted for tens of thousands of years, not doing everything right. We wouldn't want to emulate them in many ways, but their basic philosophies — being a part of nature, a part of a tribe or group without elevating, not what you call dominator philosophies — they lasted for tens of thousands of years. It took us to come and put them asunder.

ESQ:Is this just some push for retroactive communism?

TS: Not in any way. This is about individuals waking up to this. I don't have any interest in changing a system, because the system will simply get bucked back by people who haven't changed. Communism didn't work because people weren't ready for it, it was corrupt, and because it squelched individualism. This is about individuals waking up to the joy of this way.

ESQ:Are you looking for converts?

TS: I'm not trying to tell anybody how to live. [After my accident,] I didn't want to die with these ideas buried inside of me, so I felt compelled to make this movie to share what I had come to know. Hopefully if it touches [people] in some way, they can consider their own lives and how it may affect their walk. I want to be a part of the solution. But no pressure.